Category Archives: Crime

***Sunset City

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Houston, flock of birds

photo: Adam Baker, creative commons license

By Melissa Ginsburg — Lots of buzz about poet Melissa Ginsburg’s debut crime novel. In it, her home town of Houston becomes as much a character as the protagonist, Charlotte Ford, a young woman in her early 20s. Houston’s suffocating heat and dark corners, its breakneck freeways, its seedy bars and lush suburbs – a living paradigm of the income gap – are the kind of noir backdrop against which a multilayered story can play.

Narrated by Charlotte, the story begins in a terrific rainstorm when she encounters a man on the landing outside her apartment and unlocks her door in front of him – the first clue she’s missing a little something in the “ be a little careful” department.

Luckily for her, he’s a Houston police detective named Ash, but unluckily, he’s come to tell her that her oldest friend, the glamorous Danielle Reeves, has been bludgeoned to death. Charlotte and Danielle attended high school and took some drugs together, but Danielle drifted into heroin and didn’t get clean until she got caught. After four years in prison, her friendship with Charlotte had cooled, and she had taken up acting in porn videos.

Charlotte’s back story is handled mostly in a couple of awkward information dumps about her deceased mother, high school years, and growing up relatively poor. Danielle, by contrast, came from money. Her mother, Sally, from whom she is estranged, had a high-powered, high-paying job. What they had in common was that both of them were rather neglected–Charlotte because her mother was a chronic pain patient, and Danielle because of the demands of her work. No dads in the picture.

Work kept Sally so busy during Danielle’s childhood, she didn’t realize her brother was sexually abusing the girl–a plot choice that has become a cliché and, here, is not explored for its specific impact on Danielle. Now Sally wants to be in touch with Danielle and enlists Charlotte to do the outreach. That mission puts the two former best friends in touch again, just two days before Danielle’s murder. Did Charlotte’s visit begin a deadly chain of events?

She starts hanging out with Danielle’s new friends—fellow actress Audrey (another child sexual abuse victim) and video producer Brandon. To Charlotte these people seem exotic, but the first-person point of view limits readers’ access to their thoughts and feelings. Their motivations and experiences are always second-hand, filtered through Charlotte. I’d contrast this approach with John Schulian’s A Better Goodbye, which provides a fully rounded picture of people working in the sex trade.

Ginsburg attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Mississippi. In this novel, she mostly avoids literary flourishes, but occasionally her poetic side peeks through. For example, regarding the police station, Charlotte says, “Loud and ugly, the place banged against my eyes.”  Ginsburg does not shrink from discussing the seamier side of life and its difficulties, which is brave for a first novel, and in future perhaps her characters will be strong enough to carry that weight.

A longer version of this review appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover review website.

*****Dodgers

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police car

photo: P.V.O.A., creative commons license

By Bill Beverly – A modern crime classic in the tradition of Richard Price’s Clockers, Dodgers is the story of a youthful soldier in the south Los Angeles drug trade. East, a black 16-year-old, is a yardman for a drug house, which means he runs a team of younger boys who look out for approaching trouble, 24 hours a day.

Somehow, trouble slips past them, and when the police converge on the house, sirens shrieking, East narrowly escapes. But before he flees, the curious younger girl who has approached him is caught in the crossfire and dies before his eyes, an innocent whose death he cannot shake.

After the raid, of course, the house is compromised, and the drug lord gives East a new assignment. He and three others are to drive to Wisconsin and kill a man about to testify in Los Angeles against one of the gang leaders. In the great American tradition of road trips, East heads east on a fateful journey with an ill-assorted group of companions: Michael Wilson, a self-assured, one-time UCLA student who thinks he’s by far the intellectual superior of the other boys; Walter, an overweight age-peer of East’s with an aptitude for electronic crime and a greater understanding of the big picture; and, unexpectedly, East’s younger brother Ty, a stone killer at age 13 whose internal dynamics East cannot begin to comprehend.

The interactions among the four are full of youthful wit and jockeying for position, even though the outcome of the journey is uncertain and potentially catastrophic. The last piece of advice they receive before leaving LA? “Don’t make no friends.”

The book takes its title from the boys’ purchases at the sports apparel store they visit before their departure. There they purchase shirts and caps emblazoned with the logos of the Los Angeles Dodgers, not because East or the others have ever cared about the team personally, but because “White people love baseball. White people love the Dodgers.”

The trip across America and the notice four young black men arouse among the residents of the middle-America states—and the fear of the notice they may arouse—are significant and compelling features of the plot, while he nuanced depiction of East’s mental state makes for a rich and engaging reader experience.

Beverly is a teacher of American literature and writing at Trinity University in Washington, D.C., and the quality of his writing is a great strength of the book. Take this simple description: “There was a gas station. The lights in the cold made the cars gleam like licked suckers.” Any author who can conjure up an image like that deserves to be savored.

A longer version of this review previously appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

***Betty Fedora – “Crime Fiction for Kickass Women”

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Betty Fedora

It’s always delightful to find a new publisher of short fiction in the crime genre. I just read Issue Two of Betty Fedora, tagged “Kickass Women in Crime Fiction.” What’s not to like? The nine stories in this issue, selected by editor Kristen Valentine, cover a wide range of criminal activity—preventing it, investigating it, perpetrating it. Five of the nine are by women authors, too.

The first story in Issue 2 is by Montreal-based screenwriter Shane Simmons. His “Heads Will Roll,” is a story about whose title you could say “literally” and be correct. Colleen Quinn’s “Lucifer” takes a look back at an unhappy upbringing, and the difficulty of escaping it. London-based Lara Alonso Carona’s “A Diet Rich in Noir” combines the investigatory talent and family sparring skills of police detective Regan Monroe and her 19-year-old daughter Kat, a licensed private detective (first in a series of news flashes for mom). Clever.

I laughed out loud at John H. Dromey’s “Burden of Proof.” He has a woman judge, prosecutor, and witness running rings around a purse-snatcher and his male defense lawyer. At one point, the judge says to the defense attorney, “(I) wonder if you haven’t already decided you cannot win this case on its merits, so now you’re laying the groundwork for an appeal based on incompetent representation.”

I met New Jersey-based Al Tucher when he served on a panel of authors discussing why they pick faraway and exotic settings for their stories. At the time, he said he was planning a series set in Hawai`i, and here in Betty Fedora is “Luxury to Die For,” one of the results of that plan. An interview with Al is on the Betty Fedora home page.

If you like crime stories—and kickass women—and not necessarily in that order, you may want to snag a copy. I ordered mine from Amazon.

***Devil in the Grass

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alligator

(photo: heymeadow, creative commons license)

By Christopher Bowron – This debut thriller is an ambitious mix of Florida politics, Satanic cults, Seminole tradition, and alligators. And a bull shark. Author Bowron is clearly familiar with the southwest Florida setting, which he describes expertly, bringing the story to vivid life.

The Florida Everglades is home to any number of dangerous predators, including humans of the sort who don’t mix well with civilization. The 9-foot tall sawgrass that gives the Everglades its nickname—River of Grass—provides Canadian author Bowron’s inspiration for the book title as well as superb cover for his characters as they ply their small boats through its waters.

The impetus for the plot is also grounded in real life: the ongoing political battle between those who want to save the Everglades as a unique and irreplaceable natural resource and the agricultural interests making vast fortunes growing sugar cane and raising cattle along its edges. In Devil in the Grass, former pro football player and half-Seminole Jackson Walker works as an intern for Republican State Senator, James Hunter, who supports Clean Water legislation. Walker, in his mid-20s, meets and falls for a woman working for the state Republican Party. She seeks him out, seduces him, and gradually exposes him to the Satanic cult called The Brotherhood of Set.

After a while, Walker does what he believes will be an innocent errand for the cult leader, and at the book’s opening we find him hiding out in Big Cypress Swamp, accused of slaying a man and woman in a Satanic ritual. Although he believes he’s being framed because of his work with the Senator, letting himself become soft and apathetic may have contributed. He regrets the demise of his football career and its heroes: “It was the fearlessness with which they marched onto the field that had mattered to him.” Inevitably, Walker will be called upon to demonstrate that same fearlessness before the book’s last page.

If the leaders of the Satanic cult weren’t creepy enough, they have for generations used a particular local family—the McFaddens—to be their clean-up crew. They are prone to torture and killing, and they let the vastness of the Everglades hide the evidence. I’m a little burned out on serial killers with chain saws, but the alligators make for heart-pounding excitement.

As the story gets rolling, not only the police, but also the Satanists and their instruments, the McFaddens, are after Walker. And don’t forget the gators.

The book clearly ends with the promise of a sequel, which I hope can make the bad guys as believable as the environment and that Bowron gets a little help with dialog. I’m not sure when this novel takes place, but if Buck Henderson’s “old Cadillac” was manufactured after 2002, it has a trunk release lever. And I ardently wish he hadn’t laid Jimmy McFadden’s psychotic behavior at the door of “severe autism.” Scientific study has failed to link the two.

A longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

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Photographic Evidence

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Julius Caesar, bust

Julius Caesar (photo: William Warby, creative commons license)

On view in New York now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Gilman Gallery is “Crime Stories: Photography and Foul Play” for those whose interest in crime stories goes beyond the fictional to the grittily real. Since its earliest days, photography and other arts have been used to document crime and its purported perpetrators.

In this assemblage, crime-related photography from the 1850s to the present has been assembled from photojournalists, including such auteurs as Diane Arbus and Walker Evans, and a great many more dubious and less artistic sources. The resulting exhibition of some 70 works will be on display through July 31, 2016.

Among the highlights of the installation are such early examples of the genre as Alexander Gardner’s documentation of the aftermath of the assassination of President Lincoln, and rare forensic photographs by Alphonse Bertillon. In the Paris of the late 1800s, detectives throughout Europe and the United States were using Bertillon’s methods—called “bertillonage”—to identify criminals. According to the Met’s website, Bertillon’s system of criminal identification paved the way for the modern mug shot. Psychological research over the decades has failed to eradicate the “common-sense” perception that malefactors can be detected by the way they look.

In the current day, Bertillon’s methods have been displaced by much more scientific measurement and identification techniques, such as modern fingerprinting, iris scanning, and other biometric assessments.

Says the Met, in addition to the photographs on display, the exhibition will feature work by artists who have used the criminal underworld as a source of inspiration. These include Richard Avedon, Walker Evans, Andy Warhol, and Weegee. (Weegee was the pseudonym for a New York City press photographer in the 1930s and 1940s, who developed a very stark, black and white, photojournalistic style and found his subjects by trailing city emergency service workers.)

While many of the works on view may suggest an impulse for artistic debridement of the incomprehensible wounds violence inflicts, New York Times critic Ken Johnson found the exhibition “confused and confusing.” Perhaps that’s because the impulses that lead to crime and its aftermath are not necessarily coherent. They are open to interpretation.

That very confusion at the heart of the matter is part of the fascination. But, see the exhibit, and decide for yourself.

*****Black Wings Has My Angel

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cigarette

(photo: pixelblume, creative commons license)

By Elliott Chaze – A 2016 reissue, this noir crime novel by a Mississippi newspaperman, originally published in 1954, is a roller-coaster of a read—lightning fast and a lot of fun. At the outset, an escaped prisoner using the name Tim Sunblade has just finished a stint working on an oil drilling rig.

To rid himself of four months of grime, he takes a nice long bath at a cheap hotel. The comforts of the bath put him in mind of having a little female companionship, and with the bellman’s aid he meets Virginia. They turn out to be quite a team. His plan is to head west (isn’t that the classic American criminal’s destination—the wide open spaces?). Virginia’s look and demeanor suggest she’s not just a hotel tramp, and eventually he learns she’s on the lam herself, fleeing the New York City cops.

The book is full of sly dialog. When Tim discovers her call-girl past, Virginia tells him she used to “go with” various Army officers, who were always talking about “the big picture.” “Do I make it clear, Tim? About what is the big picture?” she asks. “You make it clear that your wartime activities were not on the enlisted level.”

Virginia is accustomed to rolling in dough, literally, and more than a bit money-mad, so she encourages Tim’s plan to rob an armored car in Denver and dispose of it in an abandoned mine shaft they’ve found in the Rockies. Flush with their cash, they hit the road again until a drive through a small town turns out to be a big mistake.

It’s a first-person narrative, and Chaze has captured the voice of Sunblade terrifically well. A bit bemused by life’s twists and turns, but resigned to them. Loving and hating Virginia in fairly equal amounts and never quite trusting her. Too much whiskey and too many cigarettes.

In the introduction to this reissue. Barry Gifford calls Black Wings a gem that still sparkles, and though author Chaze wrote several other novels, none of them stack up to it. A New Orleans native, Chaze worked for the Associated Press, served in the Second World War, then settled in Mississippi. He lived a time in Denver as well, which is perhaps why the book’s locations are so well drawn.

He working in various capacities for The Hattiesburg American, for a decade as its city editor. His newspaper training shows in the economy and precision of his prose, and even when events are dire, the narrator’s detached view allows his wry humor to surface. Though Sunblade doesn’t often dwell on Life’s Larger Questions, I was struck by this observation: “Life is a rental proposition with no lease.” That’s exactly the kind of thing Tim Sunblade would say.

I don’t give very many books five stars, but in this one, every word is perfect. A longer version of this review appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover website.

***Naked Shall I Return

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Cliff House fire, San Francisco

(photo: Ed Blerman, creative commons license)

By Christopher Bartley – Noir mysteries set in the 1930s are delicious. Noir mysteries set in the 1930s in San Francisco’s Chinatown are as tasty as a platter of Peking duck. In this complex novel, protagonist and career criminal Ross Duncan is launched on a mysterious quest. An an elusive couple wants him to locate a thing—they’ve never seen it and can’t really describe it—called the Blue Orb, which legend says holds the key to immortality.

Whether Duncan believes this or not is immaterial. The couple also agrees to help him fence a load of stolen jewels that will bankroll him for a good long while and for that reason alone, he’s game. He encounters a succession of interesting characters—opium den impresarios, antiques experts, people whose legends precede them—whose help he might be able to use in locating the Blue Orb. Too bad they keep being murdered before they can provide much assistance.

This book has shady characters galore, a beautiful dame out to bed Duncan, and a plot with more twists and turns than a Chinese Dragon. As it happens, he keeps meeting people connected to Adolph Sutro’s Cliff House who were present when it was destroyed in the famous 1907 fire. That the Blue Orb was smuggled out of tunnels under Cliff House on that fateful day is just one theory about its fate that Duncan must run to ground.

I wouldn’t have heard about this entertaining book if it weren’t for a review on the Crime Fiction Lover website—a great source for tips about the latest thriller, mystery, and crime novels, author interviews, and the like. Some of my reviews appear there too.

Six Months of Ellery Queen

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Ellery Queen

(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

I packed my tempting pile of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazines in my Costa Rica-bound suitcase. What a treat! Here’s the true advantage of staying at a remote resort: evenings with lots of time to read. OK, everyone has their own vices, as a review of the July 2015 through February 2016 EQMM issues amply attests.

Here are just some of my favorite stories:

  • “Gun Accident: An Investigation,” by Joyce Carol Oates – Oates really ramps up the tension in this recounting of a teenager’s perilous house-sitting experience. (July 2015)
  • “The Kashmir Enigma” by Joan Richter – A mysterious man, a romantic setting, and a never-to-be-forgotten encounter in Kashmir. (July 2015)
  • “The Longboat Cove Murders,” by Marilyn Todd – A tiny English seacoast town copes with a series of mysterious murders. (August 2015)
  • “Black Rock,” by Steven Gore – Family history isn’t always what we think it is. Gore’s latest San Francisco-based legal thriller is Night is the Hunter. (August 2015)
  • “The Siege,” by Hilary Davidson – Clever title for a story about betrayal and being just a bit too smart. This award-winning Canadian author’s latest book, Blood Always Tells, “will surprise you at every turn.” (December 2015)
  • “The Missing Motive,” by R.J. Koreto – The unmarried couple that are the protagonists in this Martha’s Vineyard murder tale are a lot of fun. (December 2015)
  • “Cruel Memory,” by Ed Wyrick – Interesting characters and situations are well-developed in this investigation of a suicide. Or was it murder? (January 2016)
  • “The Adventure of the Single Footprint,” by Robert Arthur – A murderer both gets away with it and solves his own crime. You’ll have to read the story to unravel that conundrum. First published in EQMM in 1948 and included in this year’s Sherlock Holmes theme issue. (February 2016)

2016 marks EQMM’s 75th year of publication. All this year, issues of “The World’s Leading Mystery Magazine” will include special features. You can subscribe to EQMM online or find copies in the periodicals section of major bookstores.

***Passenger 23

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cruise ship

(photo: ed2456 on pixabay; creative commons license)

By Sebastian Fitzek, narrated by Max Beesley, with a cast of actors. Unless you read German, the only way you can enjoy psychological thriller-writer Fitzek’s latest book is through Audible.com, which is perhaps why it’s called “An Audible Original Drama,” though it is available in print and for the Kindle in its original language.

Passenger 23 is based on a horrifying premise that sent me straight to fact-checking: Yearly, about 23 people—crew and passengers—disappear from the world’s cruise ships IRL. The true number is unknown, because ship owners have a substantial interest in keeping these disappearances quiet and in portraying those that do come to light as suicides, even when evidence of suicide is nonexistent. And, when disappearances occur at sea, the only investigation may be carried out by a lone policeman from the ship’s often tiny country-of-registry. This investigator’s work will not be mistaken for that of Scotland Yard or the FBI. It’s a perfect set-up for criminal shenanigans.

In Fitzek’s novel, undercover detective Martin Schwartz is willing to take on the Berlin police department’s most dangerous cases, in part because he’s become less attached to his own life in the five years since his wife and young son died in an apparent murder-suicide aboard the cruise ship Sultan of the Seas. When he receives a mysterious invitation to meet an elderly woman aboard that same ship in order to find out what really happened to his family, he can’t resist.

Once aboard, he finds himself drawn into the woman’s theory that a serial killer may be loose on the ship. A young girl who disappeared from the ship some months earlier reappears, carrying the teddy bear of his drowned son. But she’s not not making sense. The girl’s mother disappeared at the same time, in a chilling echo of what happened to Martin’s own family.

Solving this puzzle would be sufficient for any book, but Fitzek also provides an early teaser-scene about a man, located somewhere in the ship’s bowels, who has consented to have his healthy leg amputated. Why, and whether this secondary (and far-fetched) story has anything to do with the principal plot, we don’t learn until the end of the book. It’s in an epilogue that, oddly, comes after the production credits—glad I didn’t turn my iPod off too soon!

For my taste, Fitzek tries a little too hard for the gruesome detail. In addition, the cluster of murder-suicides of single moms and their children has one glaring common denominator that even a police operative far from his tiny island redoubt ought to find suspicious.

As to how well this works as an audiobook, I was disappointed. Beesley had a formal, almost stiff style out of keeping with the material, and while the other actors were used only for the scanty dialog, which felt intrusive. Audible has added intermittent sound effects—feet running, doors clanging, ropes squeaking, and the like—that didn’t add to the experience. I’d just as soon let the author tell me the door slammed than having to think “What was that?” Audible has produced a short trailer for the audio version, available on YouTube.

A somewhat longer version of this review appears on the Crime Fiction Lover website.

****The Crossing

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watch works

(photo: readerwalker, creative commons license)

By Michael Connelly, narrated by Titus Welliver – What a pleasure it is to enter the Los Angeles airspace of Harry Bosch and his half-brother Mickey Haller. Teaming up his two protagonists from the Bosch and Lincoln Lawyer series was a brilliant move by Connelly, and I’ve enjoyed every story of the two of them, fighting crime and for justice. In this latest double-outing, Connelly does not disappoint.

In The Crossing, Bosch takes the lead. He’s retired, not by choice, and rattling around his garage doing not very much. Haller approaches him about serving as an investigator on a difficult case he’s undertaken: a man accused of a brutal murder based on supposedly irrefutable DNA evidence, but Haller is convinced his client is innocent. Bosch is doubtful. Worse, if he agrees to help the defense he’s “going over to the dark side” in his own eyes, and it will be seen as a betrayal by all his former police department colleagues. Still, reviewing the case files does raise a few unanswered questions and, as we might expect, Bosch’s investigatory instincts soon overrun his reservations, and, with nothing more than the box for a luxury wristwatch to go on, he’s off. But meanwhile, a couple of rogue cops are up to something, and the brothers are in their sights.

Seeing Bosch and Haller work in their respective roles—investigator and courtroom advocate—lets Connelly show off his characters’ different skill sets and keeps the reader (listener, in this case) well entertained. It’s instructive to hear Haller’s reminders that, while Bosch may be on a search for the truth, the client must be their uppermost concern.

As to the effectiveness of the audio version, Welliver’s excellent reading, combined with Connelly’s clear writing style, made it easy to keep track of the characters and the story. Welliver is super-prepared for this reading, as he played the character of Harry Bosch in the eponymous Amazon television series that premiered in 2015. An interview with Connelly and Welliver is included in this Crime Fiction Lover preview of the television series.

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